Yeah, they are just bigger, faster modems. Nothing
fundamentally new. Broadband is, essentially, just another
method of connecting to the internet.

But it's like going from a Ford Pinto to a Ferrari.
Definitely an improvement.

I know. Chances are, *you* already have DSL, or cable. But
this is Sitka, Alaska. Pop. 8500. Isolated-- there are no
roads off the island. There are no other communities
connected at all; it's just Sitka. Worse, it's on the
outside of the Alexander Archepelago, which means we
are isolated, even for Southeast Alaska.

So the fact that we have both DSL and cable is remarkable.
It means the internet is truly coming of age, even if
everyone who can use a freakin' web browser is a computer
expert.

Fun Things
Just got back from Cleveland. I spent two weeks working
with my brother at the company for which he works. Note I
did this last year, as well. I don't feel as if I really
earned my pay, this year. But it was a blast, planning big
software projects, staying up late playing Marvel Super Hero
vs. Street Fighter, drinking beer, and hanging out with Jeff
and Dan and Zubin and Len. Very fun.

New Article
Looks like Sys Admin has
published an article of mine. Pretty boring stuff, I'm
afraid.

Privacy and Open Source
This whole "Smart Tags" thing has got me riled up. Even
here on Advogato, seems there are quite a few MS apologists
who think it's a good idea.

Maybe I am brimming with hypocricy. But doesn't it seem
strange: some think it right to give up the one true power
of the Internet-- the power of a single voice whispering to
whomever wishes to listen-- to a corporation? Any
corporation would be bad, but they wish to give up this
power to the corporation that has shown time and again they
are willing to ignore privacy issues and the rights of
individuals simply for profit.

Okay, not simply for profit-- for the power over
communication. For the right to substitute individual
communication for Microsoft's communication.

The power of the Internet is the ability of one person to
communicate to the world. Now Microsoft gets to step in and
control that communication.

Yes, I'm stating this as a worse-than-reality scenario. But
perhaps I value even the smallest of my rights; and I see
this as yet another Microsoft gambit to control communication.

Free software programmers have, in my experience, valued
privacy and freedom. With smart tags, Microsoft has
effectively stated they control our communication (and thus,
one major aspect of our privacy) by default. I will not
allow Microsoft to control the definitions and values
associated with the ideas I express to the world.

Now, all you apologists out there: Go ahead and give
Microsoft control of the definitions of the words you use.
But do it explicitly; don't let Microsoft claim birthright
to our thoughts, which is essentially what they are doing,
like a maggot whispering in your ear during every
conversation you have, twisting the words in ways that suit
only the maggot.

Force them to create a new tag to turn this "feature"
on, not off. We can do it; we are powerful in our
whispering, if we whisper together.

Building Gnome Redux
Okay, I'm better now. After a good weekend of working on my
motorcycle, and a little bit of riding (not much, as I spent
the sunshine replacing the starter relay-- it started
raining once the bike was fixed, of course), I feel
refreshed, and ready to take on the world. Or, at least,
the maze of gnome dependencies.

It's really not that bad, after all. popt had problems on
Solaris, but I found a precompiled version on
sunfreeware.com, sidestepping that issue. I found the
ORBit-martin-forked repository, just like it tells me in the
oaf README file. So the operator headspace was mine,
in this instance. I reckon that means I should take it
easier when a user has some headspace issues.

Building gnome
Okay, this is getting frustrating. Before I go off on this
rant, I'd like to admit that, yes, I shouldn't try to
compile Gnome out of CVS, and yes, I should simply download
the source packages and compile from there.

Why compile? Well, there are no packages for Solaris
yet.
Ximian promises packages soon; but I can't wait.

Why can't I wait? Because, after 8 years of Unix
desktop at SEARHC, my boss is about to cave to user
pressure. The users want PCs to run MS-Office. The users
want PCs because they are prettier.

Some of you are going to say, "Let the users get what
they
need to do their jobs." Sure, fine. But they don't
need PCs!!!!!Some people do, yes. But they
already have PCs. Out of 450 desktops, only about 30 are
PCs. And because of this, our IS department has an
operating budget of less than 3% of the total of the
consortium's budget. Most users do quite well with X
terminals and (now) SunRays.

So, I figured I'd install Gnome and KDE, and show
everyone a
nice, pretty, easy-to-use desktop, with Nautilus and
Evolution. Get them excited, you know?

But Gnome is so Goddamned hard to compile, from
CVS.
There are so many conflicting dependencies; some core
modules require ORBit, and some require ORBit2. Fine, but
ORBit2 doesn't even compile. So I can't compile bonobo,
which requires oaf, which requires ORBit2.

Yeah. I know. I should just go back to source
tarballs. I
will. But Gnome desperately needs some sort of build
manager, something that can keep all the packages in sync
with the latest possible source from CVS. I like to test
Gnome, to play with new features, to see what it does. A
need to fill-- something I should write code for, yes? In
my copious free time perhaps?

*sigh* Back to tarballs with me. I'm not
looking
forward to it; but what the hell. As long as I can get
Evolution and Nautilus to compile. They don't even have to
compile on the same box. I have more than enough computing
power-- part of that 3% went to buying a couple of
additional E450s, and a bunch of Sun Fire 280Rs. I have
horsepower out the wazoo. (Whatever the hell that
means.)

Rant mode off. I've just had a bad day; spent hours
working
on Crisis Problems, and *all* of them turned out to be
operator headspace-- and not mine.

Oh, well. Such is life.

Bike Stuff
I think this weekend I will work on my bike, and not touch
the computer at all. I have a BMW R90/6. The starter relay
went out, and I found a great link pointing to using
alternate relays (as opposed to the Bosch stock relay). So
I will try that. Should be fun, don'tcha think? I'm really
excited about getting my bike back on the road.

Then I can ride the full 14 miles of road available to me.
So far, that's the only drawback to living on an island.
Not much space for road trips.

Yikes!
I accidentally posted a reply to the Micrsoft's new
tactics article. Sorry about that. I hit the submit
button, realized I'd stupidly misspelled "proselytizing,"
and tried to stop the connection before it submitted. (This
usually works, since our connection is so slow.)

Again, sorry. Didn't mean to post twice, though I took that
chance when I did it, understanding the possible
repurcussions

WindowMaker
I worked around the WindowMaker menu/docking problems. I
wrote some menu management scripts that create stub scripts
to launch applications from the appropriate server. Now we
can install the same menu on any of our machines, adjust a
file specifying the location of the stubs and the servers
from which the apps are run, and then run an install
script. It's much easier than it sounds, and it works well.

This is a problem with X11, and not with WindowMaker, per
se. X11 apps report the binary invocation, and not the
shell script used to launch the binary. Since we use a lot
of shell script wrappers to set up environment variables,
log events, etc, this makes it difficult to inform the
window manager how to properly re-launch the application.

WindowMaker
WindowMaker has one distinct flaw in its icon-docking
behavior. If you create a menu pick that rsh's to another
server to run a program, and you then dock the icon on the
wharf, the docked icon will try to launch the program as if
it were local. So, if the WMRootMenu item is like this:

SHEXEC "rsh denali /usr/local/bin/netscape -display
$DISPLAY"

and then you dock the netscape icon, the docked icon
will
try to launch netscape with this command:

/usr/local/bin/netscape -display sunray:2

for instance.

This is an undesireable behavior, in a lot of cases.

Anyway, I have a work-around that works fairly well,
but
it's non-optimal.

Long Live Casbah
I hopped on over to #casbah at the casbah.org irc server,
but
noone was home. Sigh. I first saw this project almost 2
years ago, and thought it worthy. I finally have a use for
it, and an excuse to dedicate some time, and I find it is
dead. Another worthy project, dead and unremarked.

The road to software freedom is strewn with the
husks of
dead and desicated projects. Some are nothing (such as my
own Gnome Filer project), killed by worthier projects (have
I mentioned entity
yet?); others died too young.

Such is Casbah.

Casbah promised to be a great and cohesive
Java-based
object-oriented buzzword-compliant object-service behemoth.
It coulda been a contenda. It shoulda been a contenda.

Entity
I haven't contributed anything to Entity yet. I have
started an HTML renderer similar to the GTK+ renderer; the
idea being the same entity code that creates Gtk+ widgets on
the screen can create an HTTP stream of HTML/JS widgets;
that is, a web server that serves up Entity applications,
and the applications can be designed and built using
Stembuilder.

I haven't gotten very far.

It has nothing to do with Entity, which is well-designed
(IMHO). I just don't have time for outside activities these
days, it seems. Work takes a lot of time, as does the house
(though I must say I am now proficient at drywalling).

Sounds like a cop-out, doesn't it? It's not, really. I can
devote some time from work to coding, once I've knocked out
a few of my current projects.

Sunrays
One of my current projects is the deployment of Sunrays
across the consortium. We currently use NCD X terminals on
most of the desktops (with a few PCs for the diehards), and
Sun hardware in the back room. This has worked very well
for us, but since NCD has stopped development on their X
terminals, we've not had a good idea for their replacement.
We tried Netwinders (which were OK, but expensive), iPAQs
(ditto), and Sunrays. Of the bunch, the Sunrays look the
most promising. Although they have their own drawbacks
(they are true thin-clients, and every client has an X
server running on a Sun box), they have a lot of potential,
as well.

What I like: the Sunrays have a card slot. Each user is
given a card. If you log in with the card in the slot, your
session is tied to the card; you can remove your card from
one Sunray, walk across the room (or across the hospital)
and insert your card, and viola! your session appears at the
new Sunray. And securing your session is as easy as
removing the card and placing it in your pocket-- true
physical security.

And, it allows us to use the Sunrays and X terminals in the
same environment.

Also, I convinced my boss to use Windowmaker as the
standard desktop. Cool.

What I dislike: I hate that it is tied to Sun hardware. I
like Sun machines for the most part, but I dislike
proprietary protocols.

Sitting here listening to Ben Folds Five, contemplating my
keg of stout (which is finally ready for consumption),
staring out the window at the alternating bands of blue and
grey, I have to wonder: what the hell have I been up to
these last few months?

Not much, really. I spent a couple of weeks contracted to
TG Embedded in Cleveland, working on some semi-Linux related
things. Fun stuff, really; I did some coding (though not
much), some sysadmin (very little, really), and lots of
hanging out pretending to earn my money. I did
learn about kernel module programming, though. Now if only
I could get some cool new hardware and become a kernel
hacker.

After New Years, I went to a conference in Anchorage (which
is really just a chunk of Down South grafted into the
least-desirable bit of Alaska) concerning health care issues
across the state, as it relates to Indian Health Services
providers. (SEARHC, the company for which I work, is an IHS
provider.)

The only thing everyone agreed on was this: we need
high-speed reliable network access to the villages. Like we
needed X-ray glasses to see that.

Anyway, I don't have anything brilliant to say today.
(Yep. I know I don't have anything brilliant to say
any day.) I just wanted to get back to Advogato,
as it is my only active link to other geeks.

Gnome Filer
I am abandoning the gnome-filer project. I haven't done
much with it in a long time, and it really is poorly
designed (through no-ones fault but my own).

Instead, I am contributing what I can to Entity. Anyone
interested in XML-based interface languages should check
this out. This is how Gnome Filer should have been done in
the first place-- the XML engine was perfected, then they
started adding "renderers," DTDs based on whatever interface
you require-- language (Perl, Python, Javascript, etc) or
GUI (Gtk+ so far-- Tk is in the works, I've heard).

I always considered Javascript a toy language. Now that
I've seen what it can do outside the limited environs of a
web browser, I've changed my mind. It's not going to
replace Perl anytime soon, but it isn't nearly as terrible
as I'd supposed.